Over several centuries, the Serer of the Siin region of Senegal developed a complex system of land tenure that resulted in a stable rural society, productive agriculture, and a well-managed ecosystem. Dennis Galvan tells the story of what happened when French colonial rulers, and later the government of the newly independent Senegal, imposed new systems of land tenure and cultivation on the Serer of Siin. Galvan's book is a painstaking and skillful autopsy of ruinous Western-style "rational" economic development policy forced upon a fragile, yet self-sustaining, society. It is also a disquieting demonstration of the general folly of such an approach and an attempt to articulate a better, more sensitive, and ultimately more productive model for change--a model Galvan calls "institutional syncretism."
Dennis C. Galvan is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies and Co-Director of the Global Oregon Initiative at the University of Oregon. He is currently a Fulbright Scholar in Senegal, West Africa, at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1996, and his B.A. in International Relations from Stanford in 1987. He has conducted field research since 1988 in a cluster of thirty villages in rural Senegal, as well as in Dakar. His book on institutional syncretism and changes in land tenure and local government systems in rural Senegal, The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal (University of California Press, 2004) won the 2005 Best Book Award from the African Politics Conference Group.
His published work on Senegal explores institutional change, peasant adaptation of property regimes, social capital and democratization, sustainable development, and grass-roots patterns of nation-building. This work has appeared in edited volumes and venues such as the Theory and Society, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Modern African Studies, Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, Electoral Studies, and African Economic History. He is co-editor of Reconfiguring Institutions across Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), which explores grass roots efforts to refashion state and economy across the developing world. He is currently completing a book called Everyday Nation Building, which explores the ongoing, ordinary-life construction of inclusive forms of identity and community in Senegal and in Central Java, Indonesia.
